Critics reviews

I have my doubts, because this conceit is predicated on the assumption that the TV audience is a pack of blithering idiots—everyone, that is, except you and me and a few other media-savvy commentators. Far from being a visionary or original notion, this is one of the root assumptions of our mass culture. And if we’re all living inside the same bad TV show, what else could The Truman Show be saying? It’s merely confirming the message.

There are so many ways the tenuous conceit of The Truman Show could have gone wrong and run out of satiric steam. But it is a pleasure to report that it is a good, intelligent, insightful movie instead, with many of the romantic and redemptive virtues of last year’s unappreciated Gattaca, which was written and directed by the New Zealand-born Mr. Niccol, also the screenwriter for The Truman Show.

It’s… fairly profound, posing questions that philosophers have been bickering about for centuries… What is the nature of reality? To what extent are we products of our environment, passively accepting the paradigms offered to us? …The trouble is, Weir and Niccol know this all too well, and ultimately they aren’t content to simply present this hypothetical entertainment future and let us puzzle out the larger implications for ourselves.